Derek Ashford

Metafiction in video games evolved from playful fourth-wall breaks in 1980s titles like Zork and StarTropics to profound self-referential loops in Space Quest III/IV and ontological twists in Monkey Island 2. We explore how interactivity amplifies self-awareness across decades, turning players into co-authors of the deconstruction in classics and modern experiments alike.

John Tierney’s 1996 essay “Recycling Is Garbage”claimed that mandatory recycling was wasteful, expensive, and symbolic rather than truly green. We revisit his arguments and examine 2026 realities. Tierney’s skepticism holds, but targeted innovations now make recycling viable for high-value materials when driven by economics, not ideology.

Hate speech laws, a major post-WWII legal innovation, criminalize incitement to hatred against protected groups. Unlike traditional bans on sedition or blasphemy, they were driven by leftist forces (communists, socialists, progressives, anti-colonialists) rather than natural Western greco-roman, judeo-christian and democratic liberal traditions.

On how contemporary youth slang is fundamentally shaped by internet-based environments and differs structurally, socially, and cognitively from earlier forms of street-based slang grounded in face-to-face interaction.

On how the fixation on pop culture as a fascist barometer is largely a distraction, a superficial exercise that misses the slow, complex, and infinitely more dangerous consolidation of power within institutions.

On how hardcore woke culture is best understood not as a novel ideological development, but as a contemporary manifestation of a recurring historical pattern: radical egalitarianism pursued as a total moral project.

On the work of Carlo Rovelli, Relational Quantum Mechanics as conceiving all properties, not just velocity, as relative to interacting systems. Things are bundles of relations; no absolute state of the universe exists. Reality is events-between, not objects-in-themselves.